Is there a way to prevent a particular gem from being updated by gem update?

My OS is CentOS-5.5. The upstream provider stabilizes packages
to provide long term support. Recently, a gem author upgraded a gem
in a point release in such a way as to brake compatibility with the
vendor supplied package. The proposed solution is to upgrade the
vendor's package. That is not an option for this system. Nor is
removing the gem since we need its functionality to support
ActiveWarehouse-ETL.

We run gem update on a regular basis and the problem that this
situation causes is that we now have to run gem outdated and then
update gems individually to get around this one item. Is there any
way to turn off automatic updates for specific gems so that we can
return to just running gem update?

The problem is with sqlite3-ruby.-1.3.0 The author has been
notified. His answer is that our version of sqlite3 is too old.
Which is perfectly true and will not be altered .

We need an sqlite3 adapter to enable ActiveWarehouise-ETL. I am
perfectly content to stay on 1.2.5 but we have a number of other
gems, notibly passenger, rails, rack, devise, cucumber, etc. which
need to be updated fairly frequently. Going though a long list of
gem updates by hand on multiple systems is a bit tiresome.

My current idea is to simply remove (uninstall <- strange
word to use) the sqlite3-ruby gem, run the update, and reinstall
the particular version of sqlite3-ruby that we use. I suppose that
bundler is meant to address this very issue so I guess I will try
that route first.

That this issue revolves around a point release is a bit
problematic from my standpoint. I should think that any update the
breaks backwards compatibility should have a change to the major
revision number.

In this regard, an enhancement that I would like to suggest is
that Ruby-Gems should not 'update' gems that have a major revison
number change, or at least provide a switch (--safe) to optionally
enable this functionality. In this scenario a 'gem update' would
update minor revsions and patches as now but only notify that an
'install' of a major revsion number update is required when one is
detected. An advantage to this approach is that gem authors could
then maintain parallel updates to two streams of a single gem
family (Rails-3 and Rails-2 for instance) and these would not
clash. So, if someone only had Rails-2 installed then Rails-3 would
not be automatically added. I suppose this would also require a
--quiet switch to turn off unwanted notifications.